Wide-spread utilization of search engines has caused changes in the way people locate information. Traditionally, research for information was commonly conducted by searching through printed documents (e.g., in libraries, etc.). More recently, search engines have become more commonly utilized to find information, where a search engine can perform a search over documents of the World Wide Web (the Web) to retrieve information. For example, significant portions of online users currently use search engines to find information on the Web, with many using search engines daily. Moreover, research undertaken by college students, faculty, professional researchers, and the like often begins with a search engine query. Search engines can dictate habits of knowledge discovery on the Web.
Even though many queries submitted to search engines represent one-off tasks, a portion of the queries are repetitive. For instance, end users often process batch data by making a series of similar queries to a search engine. A typical example is finding a similar piece of information about items in a given list (e.g., acquiring contact information for people in a list, getting bibliography information for a list of articles, etc.).
Moreover, factoid questions (e.g., “Who invented radio?”, “What is the population of Germany?”, “When is ‘XYZ Movie’ going to be released?”, etc.) can constitute a portion of user queries. Search engines have recently been designed to handle some factoid questions, introducing a notion of a micro-segment of queries—a specific category of questions, for which the search engine shows an instant answer underneath a search bar, along with a list of search results. The source of data for answering conventional micro-segment questions is typically a structured database. However, the information presented in an answer to a micro-segment question is commonly limited to the content of the structured database, answer extraction code is typically hard-coded for each micro-segment, and time-sensitive information tends not to be tracked consistently.